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Friday March 29, 2024

US elections

By Sonali Kolhatkar
November 07, 2018

Unprecedented amounts of money have flowed into the 2018 midterm elections, and voters are being bombarded with TV commercials and mailers that use misleading and fear-based language. President Donald Trump and the Republicans, in particular, are sending a strong message to Americans that the economy has never been better, and that the GOP will protect us from all the ‘other’ people looking to take away our rights and earnings: immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists and more.

But if one clears away the confusing barrage of messages, there is one narrative that has the strongest bearing on reality, and that is that most Americans are financially struggling to stay afloat – people of color more so than whites – and corporate elites are laughing all the way to the bank as politicians blame vulnerable communities for the ills facing whites.

Obscuring this reality through his virulently racist messaging, the president has been effective at using the propaganda playbook of authoritarian leaders to rally his resentful base. In the past few weeks, we have seen a confluence of the predictable outcomes of his racist scapegoating. A Republican man and ardent Trump supporter, Cesar Sayoc, threatened many of Trump’s favorite targets of vitriol, from former President Barack Obama to Rep Maxine Waters, using crudely made pipe bombs. A white man named Gregory Bush tried to enter a predominantly black church in Kentucky, and when he couldn’t, he killed two African-Americans at a supermarket, remarking on his way out to another white man that “Whites don’t kill whites”.

And of course, the worst act of anti-Semitic violence in US history took place last week at the Tree of Life synagogue when a white man, Robert Bowers, whipped into a frenzied confluence between anti-immigrant and anti-Jewish sentiments, gunned down 11 people. Protesters in Pittsburgh rightly laid the blame for the synagogue attack on Trump’s hate-mongering, saying, “Words Matter” and “It’s Your Fault.”

Meanwhile, the Republican Party is in deep trouble because it has continued to obscure its long-term underlying racist messaging while promoting the same policies that Trump has pushed: kickbacks for the wealthy through tax cuts couched in ‘middle-class relief’, a weakening of public protections through deregulation explained as an economic driver that will somehow create jobs, and nativist attacks on immigrants that claim they are a drain on the economy. Voters love Trump for expressing their base instincts in clear language – instincts that were honed for years through Republican dog-whistling – but now care little for Republican lawmakers, who appear weak and contradictory in comparison with Trump.

A recent New York Times article attempting to explain voter attraction to Democrats in the Rust Belt concluded that “Mr Trump still has extraordinarily high approval ratings among those who voted for him. The problem for the Republicans is that Mr Trump made these Rust Belt voters into Trump voters, but he never made them Republicans”. Meanwhile, Republicans are left desperately trying to defend their signature legislation – the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act – to voters who have very little practical evidence to show for the riches they were told they would reap.

Within this framework, Democrats could be effectively harnessing public anger at the deadly deeds Trump’s racist messages have unleashed. Or, they could cleverly expose the Republican Party’s hypocrisy in celebrating a tax reform law that is a windfall for the wealthy, disguised as tax relief for ordinary Americans. But as in 2016, Democrats are casting themselves as “not Trump” rather than selling voters on a vision that could offer an alternative to Trump. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) website has a simple message, “Defeat Trump’s Republican House,” instead of something on the order of “Build an Economy for All, End Racism.”

This article has been excerpted from: ‘Economic Inequality and Racism Are This Election’s Crucial Issues’.

Courtesy: Commondreams.org